Inbred Mm domesticus, I think I misunderstood the point you were making.
I’ve just completed a postgrad degree in neuroscience; you won’t hear any objections from me that there’s a big link between physiology and psychology.
Congratulations, good luck to you.
I thought you were speaking of visible physiological – that is, physiognomic – differences between races.
At the level you are speaking of, there is, AFAIK, no evidence of innate physiological differences between racial/ethnic groups, with some minor exceptions, like differential resistance/susceptibility to certain diseases, which almost certainly would not manifest as psychological differences.
But, between physiognomy and psychology? (See above post.)
Your scientific data that you have used to support your position is rocking my world. Oh yeah. Mm, rock it baby.
Oh wait no…no, you just flailed about without providing the slightest bit of data or reason to think there’s data. Impressive stuff there, man.
What do you think would happen if I was to call up a random selection of elementary, middle, and high schools through the US and ask:
- What the racial demographics of their school is.
- How many basketball courts per student they have.
- What percentage of all physical activity space (including soccer fields, jungle gyms, etc.) the basketball courts constitute.
- How much structured time is spent, per student, having them play basketball in the school curriculum.
Personally, I suspect that black people are often over-represented in the inner city and lacking in the countryside, and also that even in the inner city that wealthier schools have more white students because housing prices are higher in the surrounding region, and black students end up at the less wealthy schools.
A school in the countryside can have all the room it needs for sports equipment and space. A wealthy school can afford to purchase more land for various sports and physical activities. A poor school, dumped in the middle of the city has to limit itself and of all sports, the basketball court takes up the least space and is subsequently the cheapest. Black kids end up playing basketball significantly more than white kids do. When they go to compete in middle school or high school, the black kids end up beating the pants off the white kids because they have several times the practical experience and have developed the muscles for that one, specific sport.
That’s before even getting into the difference between a white kid and a black kid deciding whether or not playing basketball is worth banking his financial future on.
I mean perhaps if I did go around calling up schools and asking my four questions, it would reveal that my supposition of the profile of American schools is wrong. Do you think so?
Funny how the Eastern Europeans are in there.
Have you considered the possibility that people with fewer other options in life may wind up doing better in sports? Take extreme examples of an athletically gifted white kid in the 'burbs, and a parallel black kid in the ghetto.
As the kid in the 'burbs grows up he does well at sports. He’s the high school QB, on the b-ball team, on the golf team. He’s also good at math, and winds up in a ‘gifted’ program. His dad helps him buy a car when he’s 17. He is offered an athletic scholarship or an engineering scholarship, but winds up getting an engineering degree, and not going into pro sports. He talked with his dad about it, and his dad pointed out that a lot of people try, but few make it, and you can always blow out a knee and end your career, while engineering is forever.
The kid in the ghetto is equally good at at sports and math, and doesn’t wind up in a gifted program, cause there are none. He plays basketball, not golf, and not football due to lack of access. He has no car. He plays a hell of a lot more basketball than the other guy. He gets a basketball scholarship but not an engineering scholarship, does well, and gets picked up by the pros.
If you plug that kind of stuff into a Monte Carlo simulation a couple of thousand times, you’d wind up with a lot of white engineers and black athletes.
I am sure there is a report here and there mentioning some subtle correlation or an ability to predict characteristics from somebody’s face, but not in the manner supported by what is typically meant by the term. It’s important when evaluating science to understand the strength of the effect under discussion. That’s not generally discussed in media handlings of “intriguing” data like physiognomy or body language or whatever woo-woo-esque research article comes out.
What about pygmees?
Actually here’s my take on it:
I think there’s an unfortunate mixing of terms when we use the word “equal” and a corresponding confusion of whether they do, or should, influence eachother. And at the root is social/judicial equality.
Most reasonable people (at least according to my definition of reasonable) would agree that all ethnic groups should be equal in social and judicial or political terms. Most reasonable people feel VERY strongly about this, for example me and you.
For some (most?) people the strong support of this also translates into an unwillingness to believe there are statistical inequalities. But the first premise, that all men are “created equal” (in the eye of the law) does not depend on that. It just so happens that most people, based on the “veil of ignorance”, prefers us all to have the same social rules no matter of what the probability is, and statistics are all just about probability, not fact. Statistically whites have more money than blacks, I’m white but I’m pretty sure that Bill Cosby has more money than I do.
Regarding the IQ issue I think it is extremely improbable, not to say impossible, that there would not be statistical differences between ethnic groups, but that’s understandable:
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IQ tests are the perfect tool to measure how good someone is at performing IQ tests at a given time. Every other conclusion drawn from them is very much in question.
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IQ tests are constructed in a specific culture, and originally at least by a very homogenous ethnic group. It seems very unlikely that they would not favor some cultural or ethnic group. I for example perform worse at english IQ tests than Swedish ones. I’d probably perform worse on an IQ test in swedish made by a japanese person than one made by a swede. Or at least perform differently.
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Even understanding the limitations of the IQ test and accepting them it would be hard to find the circumstances to test ethnic groups, because it is so hard to know what is specifically an ethnic difference when there are cultural and social differences that are so very important. Lets say Jews perform better than Italians on IQ tests. Is that because Jews are genetically predisposed towards being good at IQ tests, or do jews have a cultural or social structure that encourages the traits needed? You’d have to have a significant amount of ethnic italians raised as jews, or the other way around, without anyone knowing they were jews/italian before you would know.
Where I am at right now opinion-wise is that I am open to the idea that different genomes could influence all human traits, some which could translate into statistical differences, but that this has no connection at all to whether people are “equal” in the way usually meant. I would be willing to accept, if given evidence, that eastern-africans are statistically inherently “better” at long distance running, but I don’t believe it should have any effect on how we organize our society.
To take an extreme example, if it turned out that white americans are genetically more predisposed towards mass murder, I would still not support a bill saying that white americans should be treated differently than any other group.
I’d guess the Eastern Europeans are in there because there’s a sub-population with the right gene pool. The fact that large populations have averages does not mean they do not contain sub-populations with varying genetic prevalences for skillsets. And I would say it’s a broad opinion that the quality of play on the part of the Eastern Europeans is not on par with that of black players, the typical player being a large gangly soul who mucks around under the basket.
As to your ghetto scenario, it’s a popular scenario unsupported by facts. For one thing, even in the suburbs, the basic disproportionate representation remains the same, even where your scenario does not apply. For another, the opportunities extended to the ghetto kid equally good at math are enormous, and recruitment is extensive for that skillset.
This notion that black kids get better because that’s all there is to do and they practice a lot more is pure baloney, completely unsupported. Relative wealth is not a driver for whites abandoning a potential basketball career in droves.
Whereas your position is supported? I bet it’s a lot easier to find statistics on bone measurements than it is to find statistics on how many hours a 12 year old plays a particular sport, so you should be able to beat us to the draw.
CONTENTdm (PDF)
“In one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive sociological studies
of this topic, Tamela and David Eitle found African American boys are 1.6 times
more likely than their white counterparts to play football, and 2.5 times more
likely to play basketball. White boys, on the other hand, are more likely to play all
other sports than African Americans. When other factors are controlled for, black
males are actually 2.5 times more likely to play football and 5.7 times more likely
to play basketball than white males. (See Goldsmith 2004, 2003 for additional
and more detailed discussion and analysis).”
The US is 12.4% black and 75% white. Out of 1000 boys, if there were 75 white kids who played basketball, there would be 71 black kids who played basketball in school – i.e. fairly even even though there are six times as many white kids nationally.
Now that’s just the proportion that play the sport. As is noted in the paper, white boys play lots of different sports. African Americans basically only play basketball and football. So we have about even numbers of kids to pick from, in terms of basketball, but with more experience on the side of the black kids, a greater impetus to get a sporting scholarship since they don’t have as much money, and a greater impetus to go on to a career in sports since they might view that as their better option than trying to make it in the “white” world.
Rat rocks.
If they are so bad, why hasn’t a black guy taken their job?
Really, that’s pathetic.
This was hilarious. To be fair, Cavalli-Svorza (1994, map 31) did discover the haplotype HLAA*9 to have a higher frequency in central Siberia and surrounding regions, and later found this controlled the production of the “mucking around under the basket” protein.
Oh, wait, no he didn’t. My bad.
For the most part, of course, “black guys” have taken over what was previously the job of white guys in the NBA. Remember the whole point is broad averages and not exceptions.
As to whether or not the Eastern Europeans are qualitatively different players from those who are black, it’s not a core part of any argument of mine; simply an observation. I do not think that observation is peculiar to me.
Have we identified a specific geneset unique among Eastern Europeans? Not yet, but I suspect we will if we decide to look. The differences among us are driven by genes. What is pathetic on this board, JKellyMap, is the open mockery of the idea that genes are disparately prevalent among groups. To date, every study finds genes underpinning those differences, whether we are looking for differences in bone or muscle or hemoglobins or anything else. But have your pleasure mocking while you can; as genotyping becomes less expensive, the map will become clearer. So far the data don’t support your implied egalitarianism.
On the other hand, I think it’s fairly clear that Pakistanis are genetically superior at taxi driving.
On that note, you’ll no doubt have heard of the recent study by researchers from the University of New Mexico.
They looked at infectious disease and IQ scores for 113 countries (note: did not guess any) and found a strong (negative) correlation; stronger than between IQ and GDP PPP, or other possible causes for the correlation that they could think of.
Furthermore, they hypothesize that there will be a strong positive correlation between asthma and IQ scores. There is a separate study looking at this, but preliminary results are that there is such a correlation, and again it’s a strong one.
Thoughts?
(some more data)
Oops! 184 countries.
Remember that whether looking at NBA stars or number of MIT PhDs, you’re looking at the far extremes of a single bell-curve distribution. Relatively small differences in the average of two groups are magnified the further away from “normal” you get. This means two things:
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It is wrong to say “Blacks dominate the NBA by 50:1, so the average black guy is fifty times more likely to be good at basketball than a white guy.” (Human biodiversity overreach)
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It is wrong to say “Look, obviously the average black guy is not 50x more likely than a white guy is good at basketball. The NBA differences can’t be due to inherent differences; they can only be the result of cultural differences or society’s racism!” (Human biodiversity denialism)
Chief Pedant, I am not trying to imply egalitarianism. You are quite right that humans can be grouped meaningfully using many kinds of genetic markers, and the maps which result can contribute to our understanding of past movements of human populations. And sometimes, a specific measure (say, average height) – which is of course the result of many genes interacting with each other, and with the environmental life-path of the person – can be meaningfully generalized about some population, and sometimes that measure will tend to (not always, but tend to) have an advantage in some human activity.
But the interactions of all these factors are SO much more complex than you seem to think they are. Every single component (who belongs in which “group” as defined for a specific, one-time purpose; genetic/environmental interacions; gene-gene interactions; etc. etc.) is fuzzier than you think, and the interaction of the components is therefore fuzzier still. It’s just not worth wasting one’s time trying to come up with clear, general answers to what you might call “medium-sized questions”.
Little questions, like, “haplotype XYZ is 65% more prevalent among persons whose ancestors lived for at least three generations in predominantly Finno-Ugric-speaking regions than among persons whose ancestors lived for at least three generations in predominantly Altaic-speaking regions” – that we can answer.
And broad penotypical patterns which tend to have to do with appearance traits, things which either never had a particular evolutionary advantage, or if they did somewhere, sometime, certainly do not in today’s world – curly or straight hair more common amongs certain human populations, things like that – those things we can say, as well. Of course.
But the kind of “medium-sized” questions you tend to enjoy considering cannot have the clear answers you seem to want them to have, just by the nature of the data sets and how the various components interact. They just can’t.